Harare, Zimbabwe (News of the South)-The Zimbabwean government is setting up an Evaluation and Monitoring Committee (EMC) that will gauge the results of the recently gazzetted Statutory Instrument 64 of 2016 which places license requirements for the importation of certain basic goods.
In tandem with that it has also set in motion the creation of a standards enforcing organ whose duty will be to limit the entrance of sub-standard commodities into the economically challenged country.
All these measures are ostensibly structured to get the best economic results in a country whose policy direction and implementation has left much to be desired.
Speaking at the 76th Chamber of Mines AGM and conference in Harare recently the Minister of Industry and Commerce Mike Bimha said the EMC would monitor the benefiting sectors to see if they made any progress in the new environment.
“We have put in place a Monitoring and Evaluation Committee because these measures (of SI 64) are time bound therefore the committee will evaluate how the measures fare and present results at a certain point”, he said.
The SI 64 evaluation committee will be comprised of private sector and government personnel though specific names could not be ascertained.
The minister said in tandem, he was leading the creation of a standards enforcing organ that would help limit the entrance of substandard commodities into the country so as not to reduce it to a supermarket.
“We all know that we have the Standards Association of Zimbabwe (SAZ) which is tasked with setting standards for industry, but it cannot enforce them, so we have set in motion the creation of an organisation that actually has the power to enforce the standards”.
“I have presented to Cabinet the principle for setting up this and it has been approved and now we are working on the legislation”.
“Currently Bureau Veritas is doing the duty for us whilst we wait for the creation of our own”, he said.
Bureau Veritas is one of the global leaders in Testing, Inspection and Certification (TIC) of products to ensure quality, safety, environmental protection.
Defending SI 64, which has resulted in demonstrations in some parts of the country, the minister said the list of banned commodities had actually come from industry and was not a government declaration thus leaving room for amendments if the existance of errors were proven.
“The list came from industry players and it’s a recent SI so they are so many things that we need to correct so that we achieve our purpose”, he said whilst responding to grievances that some of the commodities under the SI were not even available locally.
“We initially wanted the list to be an administrative issue without it being an SI but even now if there is sufficient evidence to necessitate change we can change. Policies are made by people so we can make amendments,” he said.
The list of commodities requiring permit licenses so as to be imported under Zimbabwe’s Statutory Instrument 64 include vehicle spares, cellphone handsets, steel structures, cooking oil, camphor creams and salads.
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